RDFa/Microdata Task Force Suggestions

bcc: RDF Web Apps WG and HTML WG

Hi Tim,

At one point during the TAG telecon[1] regarding RDFa/Microdata, you had
asked for suggestions for participants in the RDFa/Microdata task force.
One of the suggestions was to pick people that didn't have a direct hand
in the editing of the specification or development of the technology,
but had a commercial or implementation interest in Linked Data. The RDF
Web Apps WG had a discussion[2] about this last Thursday and came up
with the following list of suggestions:

People:

Philip Jägenstedt
  * created the first Microdata parser, also an Opera employee
Dan Brickley
  * he tends to be very even keeled and knowledgeable about the various
    approaches.
Jeni Tennison
  * she has been a good critic of all approaches
Henri Sivonen
  * most vocal critic of RDFa, but is also the editor of the
    Microdata spec now (IIRC), also a Mozilla employee
Richard Cyganiak and/or Michael Hausenblas
  * strong critics of more traditional RDF mentality, but also work
    with a diverse set of people and technologies at DERI.
Nathan Rixham
  * Very knowledgeable about technical JavaScript implementations and
    flexible thinker regarding Linked Data and Semantic Web.
Ramanathan Guha
  * Proponent behind schema.org and one of the founders of RDF
Kavi Goel
  * Proponent behind schema.org and Google search services
Peter Mika
  * Implementer of RDFa and Microdata at Yahoo Research
Evan Sandhaus, Andreas Gebhardt, Misha Wolf, and/or Stuart Myles
  * From New York Times, Getty Images, Reuters and Associated Press,
    respectively. Three of them are the founders of hNews and rNews
    semantic news standards, Misha is the New Standards Manager at
    Reuters
Yves Raimond, Nick Humphrey
  * Founder of Music Ontology and semantic web implementer, both from
    BBC
Stéphane Corlosquet or Lin Clark
  * Implementer of RDF/RDFa plugin and Microdata beta-plugin in Drupal
David Recordon and/or Paul Tarjan
  * Leaders behind the Open Graph Protocol at Facebook
Chris Messina, Brian Suda and/or Kevin Marks
  * Microformats community leaders

People that are missing:

People from the Apple WebKit team, Google Chrome team, and Microsoft.

Technology Input and Guidance:

The Editors, Chairs, and Domain Leads of the specifications (Ian
Hickson, Shane McCarron, Thomas Roessler, Manu Sporny, Tantek Çelik).

Chair(s):

Jeni Tennison, Roland Merrick, or Noah Mendelsohn.

Potential failure scenarios:

There are a great number of people listed above, which creates a number
of potential failure scenarios:

1) The group won't be able to come to a consensus on anything.
2) The group's consensus is to effectively do nothing.
3) Participants will ignore the guidance of the group and instead
   do whatever they want, anyway.

A follow-up e-mail will contain a more formal response from the RDF Web
Apps WG concerning the TAG note on the RDFa/Microdata Task Force and
suggestions on how to avoid the failure scenarios listed above.

-- manu

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2011/06/16-minutes.html#item02
[2]
http://www.w3.org/2010/02/rdfa/meetings/2011-06-30#RDFa__2f_Microdata_Task_Force_Suggestions

--
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: PaySwarm Developer Tools and Demo Released
http://digitalbazaar.com/2011/05/05/payswarm-sandbox/

Received on Sunday, 3 July 2011 17:11:36 UTC